It’s no small thing that Kansas City is the home to America’s memorial to those to served, sacrificed and died in World War I.

The Liberty Memorial was dedicated on Armistice Day in 1921, just four years after the fighting stopped in “the war to end all wars.” The five Allied Commanders attended, including Gen. John “Blackjack” Pershing, a native son of Missouri and supreme commander of the Allied forces. (It took another five years to build and open the memorial.)

In the crowd of 200,000 that day in 1921, in uniform, was Army Capt. Harry S. Truman, who led an artillery unit in France during the war. Forty years later, Truman and Dwight Eisenhower – supreme allied commander in the Second World War and the man who succeeded Truman as president – rededicated the Liberty Memorial.

The memorial was greatly improved in 2006 with the opening of a new museum telling the grim, tragic, heroic story of the war. The museum is on a par with the Truman Library, one of the community’s crown jewels.

The area’s congressional delegation is working to make sure that Liberty Memorial maintains its status by working to have the site officially designated as the nation’s memorial to the war. There is another memorial in Washington, D.C., and the tussle to shift the focus there has been going on for some time.

The argument for Kansas City is this: This is the community that raised the money and built the memorial. It has refurbished and greatly improved the site, which is a national – even world – treasure. And not every monument needs to be in the nation’s capital.

The Examiner (Independence, Mo.)